Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @10:55AM
from the what-about-a-fleet-of-a-robot-internet-butlers dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk wants to bring the internet to less-developed countries using satellites. Facebook wants to use drones. Google's betting on balloons. These crazy high-tech solutions are interesting, but are they really needed? Mark Summer doesn't think so. His company focuses on building out internet infrastructure the old fashioned way: trenching pipes, raising cell towers, and getting local governments to lease what they've already installed. "A major problem in emerging countries is that when Internet access is available, it's often expensive. That's due in part to a lack of competition among providers ... While the costs of terrestrial Internet connections are high, they're relatively predictable. And the business model is proven around the world."

A major problem bringing technological infrastructure to emerging countries is that the populace steal it. Just walk right up and take it. Any credible plan to bring Internet to the third world has contend with that sad but hard fact.

Cell towers are not generally connected to each other for the primary backbone by radio. They may be connected by radio as a fault tolerant connection, or as an out-of-band means of management should the primary fiber backbone be interrupted, but radio is predominately used for the last-mile delivery, not for the backbone.

Did you read the part about trenching and putting in conduit? He wants to put in the necessary infrastructure to do it the right way.

I mean, yeah, it will be slower, and will take up a little more power, but the bands are most likely very free in a lot of places.Most importantly, this will be considerably more accessible over a larger area, which is one of the problems with some places, long distances and uneven terrain which limits things considerably.A combination of this and something like Google Balloon would be able to get much further than short-distance cell towers.

Some connection is better than no connection.Just as long as it isn't 56k. Holy hell.

Rough terrain is an issue in some areas but most developing areas also have cheap labor and would probably love the extra jobs that laying wireand/or installing poles would require. Many of the poles in the USA were originally installed in holes dug by hand or dug with a stick of dynamite.

As far as google balloon, it seems like someone looking for something fun not something practical. The microwave towers they use to send signalsfrom newyork to chicago would seem like an ideal technology to use to get from town to town in remote areas and then long distance point to point broadcastonce you get to the town. My hometown used standard 802.11 on top of water towers. Anyone who had line of sight of the water tower could point an antennaat it and it had about a 5 mile range which would be more than enough for most small towns in remote regions.

OK, but other people are working on those problems. Just because they have 1000 problems doesn't mean that everyone should drop everything and go into an entirely new field they're unfamiliar with to solve the problem that you deem to be the highest priority. This guy and his company have know-how, capital, employees, and hardware all invested in the process of building out Internet infrastructure. To scrap their existing plans and redirect their capital to medicine, plumbing or personal safety, would basically drain their capital, while accomplishing practically nothing.

Feel free to be an angel investor in companies or non-profits that are providing the things you think are high priority to the needy, but don't feel like you can tell other people what they should do with their money.

After all, you can make an argument that the Internet can be very useful for educating people with some of the ideas that might lead them to pursue a more civilized way of life. It also leads to 411 scams, but you have to take the bad with the good.

Okay, so we get them internet access, meanwhile the people "taking care of the other problems" have made 0 headway on securing clean water, healthcare, and infrastructure.

We seem to have a particularly stupid AC here today. Why on Earth would "0 headway" be made by other people working on other problems? Because everyone has to stop doing anything in the entire country until the Internet is installed? Because the guy doing the Internet is the only guy who can do anything at all in Africa?

But hey, they can log in to facebook to complain about their dysentery, so they got that going for them. Oh right, they can't afford the internet access that was just installed.

Because the only thing the Internet is good for is Facebook? Are you twelve years old? (A smart 12 year old would know better, but we already covered that.) Gee, being able to distribute hea

Really cool thing, but giving people access to the information on how to do things like producing water or growing food, might actually solve some of these problems. But if you feel like going out and doing these things, you can feel free to.

Why does it have to be an either-or? There are enough people in this country to pursue every progressive initiative we can imagine, and then some. It's just a matter of getting the right people with the right resources focused on the right tasks. Basically, it's a logistics and optimization problem; we have more than enough capability and more than enough resources to go around. It's mainly political and economic forces that make the system extremely resistant to positive change, no matter how obviously beneficial it might be.

We are trying to do that, and established semi-monopolistic entities like the local cable company and the local landline telephone company are fighting against governments allowing new players for consumer-grade high-speed data from entering the market.

Want it to happen faster? Stop electing officials in your city, county, state, and utility districts that won't let new competitors come in.

The root cause in developing countries for the high expense and lack of competition is corruption. Bribes are required to install any infrastructure, which adds to the cost. And those who control the infrastructure have no incentive to make it available at low cost, their pockets are already lined.

Competition is overrated.These are high barrier to entry markets. That kind of market ends up as an oligopoly.To mitigate that, you need expensive and cumbersome regulation, which is very prone to corruption.

I live in Uruguay. There is a monopoly on landlines for the state telecom. Everybody gets reasonable good access, close to half the homes already have fiber.

We are a small country, but also a sparse one. It's doable elsewhere.

I think the problem here is that so many people see telecom as a market opport

It's not about being "more efficient." It's about getting the investment capital.

All Utilities are like that. When San Francisco wanted electricity at the turn of the 20th century, they first had to build the huge Hetch Hetchy dam in rural California. Next they had to install electrical generators. Then they had to string all the towers and cable to bring that electricity back to the Peninsula. Then they had to wire the streets (with industry getting first service). AFTER all that capital expenditure,

Satellites, balloons and drones are all forms of competition. It's just a matter of the providers betting on the economics of putting in cheap, low bandwidth systems vs expensive, high bandwidth ones. The cheap route bets that customers are poor and unwilling to pay for higher performance now or in the near future. The expensive route bets that economies will grow and with them, demand.

The balloon vs terrestrial infrastructure is just a risk trade-off between novel technologies and market growth.

Unfortunately, you can't actually use much of the Internet without higher speeds. The FCC itself defines "Broadband" as 25 Mb/s and above. That's virtually a minimum threshold to do anything like generating revenue with a business that relies on the Internet.

Try it out yourself: Throttle your own bandwidth back to, say, 3 Mb/s (great ghost of DSL!) for a week and notice how little you can actually get done. Google Maps are a drag, Amazon seems like you're trying to communicate with Venus (or the Pioneer

Respectfully: You're wrong. Even when the economics DO make sense, there is no Investor interested because they don't fund utilities.

The great deal with utilities is that they spin off big returns over decades; The downside is that it takes about 10 years to hit breakeven...and thinkers limited to a single quarter of future vision aren't interested at all, not when they can invest the same $35 Million with a doubling of their capital in just afew years through Wall Street.shenanigans. Another way the 1%

Give me balloon, satellite or drone, and let my pay you directly.
Right now all I have is 1M down, 300k up, for about US$30 a month.
The problem is: about 90% of my city has at leas 10M down for cheaper. But since I live in a poor community there is no "need" to poll the last 1KM of cables, to build something for the demand. Who cares about a few hundred people with low income?
Build cell towers? Again, why? To.. give internet for the poor? Who cares??
My hope was project baloon, or anything that I could pa

sure, you could use balloons or crowdfunding but can we just stick to the tried and true scientific method. For example, Ive successfully distributed internet to several cities by strapping cellphones to squirrels with a roll of duct tape. Sometimes ill see them in trees (they do this to gain the best signal.) All youve gotta do is shout your http request to them, for example, "download the latest memes, squirrel!" simple really.

Another method ive tried for more remote locations, small rural towns,

Dangit. They might just accomplish that by the time I've got my dark-matter well gravity controlled pulsar transponder system up and running with an IPN packet relayed to and from earth with only a 560 year latency.

Google, Facebook, or even Elon Industries know that. They aren't really trying to look cool while doing public service. They know the problem with a ground-based solution is neither lack of technology nor environmental. The problem is actually scale: when you start projects based on premises such as "universal", "ubiquitous", "unlimited" or "free/cheap", not even big companies can supply all of those due to obvious political reasons, such as those that bolster fair competition. Let's consider major gov'mt lobby poker Google, for instance - if they decided to extend their internet providing services to wireless in the US alone, they would pretty much have to spend billions to topple AT&T's (among others) influence on the administration. It would just make it too costly to actually provide the "free/cheap" service, and would probably imply restrictions to the other two as a trade-off, becoming effectively not "universal" nor "ubiquitous". They already have problems like that with Google Fiber (why are only some cities getting such a great service? You guessed right, existing cable company influence is blocking all newcomers on a political level), and wireless is just a much harsher market due to players being so well positioned. Now scale that to the entire world, with 200'ish countries to lobby. This goes without saying that quasi-orbital (and orbital) solutions such as balloons and satellites actually scale rather easily with minimal costs, even considering maintenance. Suffice to say, it is much easier to have this cool looking, bleeding edge solution that few will have the power to contest, due to universally acclaimed common good and obvious technological prowess (but eventually, stupid ways will be found for that, and stupid arguments will be made. Just look at Uber's case...).

When you build out the physical infrastructure, you get ancillary benefits. Roads for example. If you are laying out cable, in an area without roads, you have to build a road. This may be more expensive, but everyone around benefits from that road.

This is why he wants traditional methods. Control the wire, control the cost of the signal.
using satellites, balloons, drones - they work with beams to a spot in the sky. who can control the beams? If someone other than the local bully . . . err telcom controls access to the 'net, their business model.

Give me the ability to walk around my local telcom to get an internet feed from someone who ONLY does internet (not a subsidiary of an integrated tv/t

H..Who benefits by wired connections?the two monopolists, of courseWhy have nonsense claims about point-point wiring "superiority" save to protect the monopolies?But this is Capitalism, never forget that.And the whole POINT of Capitalism is establishing and protecting monopolistsotherwise the dynastic inheritance based wealth class might find their gains shrinking.

In most first world countries, no one ever digs up your lines or breaks into your relay facilities to steal the copper. Armed gangs don't demand bribes for building or digging on their turf. Local officials aren't constantly hassling you for kickbacks and no-show jobs for their friends. Your workers don't get robbed when they try to perform maintenance alone. Those are just SOME of the problems with building infrastructure in the third world.

You lay cable/put up a cell tower in Africa, next morning it gets sold for scrap.You lay fiber optic cable, they dig it up for the copper. You relay fiber optic cable..they dig it up for the copper again. It doesn't really matter that there is none.

Out here in rural California, virtually all the counties on the Eastern edge of the state have limited (6 Mbps) or non-existant (70% of El Dorado County, where I live) Internet service. While I laud your plan to provide service in parts of the world not served at all, wouldn't it make sense to make sure that all United States citizens have service first?

Our schools have little or no broadband. Our farmers and merchants have little or no broadband. Our local businesses can't expand markets. We have a sit

For a lot of the 3rd world countries, you'd make more social progress keeping the infrastructure out of the corrupt hands of the thugs running those countries. Balloons at 90,000 ft would be out of reach militarily for most of these places.

A lot of places can't even get common sewers together because of corruption - internet infrastructure is a non-starter. Rulers control information to control power - they have no interest in an internet educated computer literate populace.

Screw the third world, I want Google to break the cruise ship internet cartel. The third world can benefit as an added bonus, but I want Google high speed internet halfway across the Atlantic ocean. Wired internet isn't going to accomplish that.:p